SoaSEWiki:Research Overview
= General Summaries = NOTE: All Research Times use Normal Research Speed unless otherwise noted. Advent research times are straight up (i.e., not reduced by Knowledge Aggregation). Data is for version 1.03. Here's a table of the average and total costs for research, by race. This is for all Military and Civilian research (but not Fleet research): *'Levels' means how, e.g., extractor-increasing research topics have 2 levels. *'Ls/T' shows the average number of Levels per Topic. 97 Topics have 1 level, 147 have 2, and 11 have 3. *'Labs' is the average number of Labs needed per Topic. As expected given that research trees are pretty evenly distributed except for a bit fewer at the highest number of labs, the average is a little under 4 (compare how the strict average of 1 through 8 is 4.5). *The All row summarizes across all three races. Values shown are for the total credits, metal, and crystal needed to complete all levels of all topics. The Averages for resources shown above are simply the Totals divided by the number of Topics. As you can see, the three races are quite equal in terms of how many topics and levels they have, and how much it costs to research them, overall. Advent is a hair more expensive (~3% more). Here are the costs of research, relative to number of labs. They are the same for all races, except where noted: As the number of labs increases, the resources needed also increase in a regular progression. The Per Level increases are practically entirely uniform. Advent times were used straight up. Multiply the Time shown by .75 if you have full Knowledge Aggregation. = Fleet Research = All three races pay the same for Fleet Capital Ship and Support levels. Here are costs for Capital Ships (your first one doesn't need research): While the costs on the left side of the table show a big increase at levels 4 and 7 (when you get more cap ships per level), the right side shows the costs divided by the number of ships that become available - and reveals that you actually get a little breather in the rising costs at these two levels, on a per-ship basis. Support levels follow a very similar style. All costs are equal to those for Military or Civilian research, for each level: Again, you get a breather at levels 4 and 7, where more ships slots become available per level. How do Capital Ships compare to Ship Slots, by level? Players who like Cap Ships probably know this table well. It shows the max number of cap ships you might reasonably have, at a given Support level. In the "-50" column, 50 Slots are removed since you're likely to use a little of your initial free Ship Slots for scouts, colonizers, etc. So you can just barely not get all your cap ships squeezed into 4 levels of Ship Slot research. Vasari Phasic Transmissions might help here by increasing your ship slots by 15%, but it's expensive: It's a 6-lab topic with 2 levels, making the full 15% increase a little more than twice as expensive as level 6 Ship Slot research. If you're at e.g. level 6 of Ship Slots, it also doesn't add as many Ship Slots (1360 * .15 = 204 vs. the 270 allowed by level 6). It's one grace is that it doesn't incur any upkeep.